


Hearts and Hats

by sergeant_angel



Category: Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, gonna go with this instead, i am alice in wonderland/through the looking-glass TRASH do you hear me, i read the synopsis for once upon a time in wonderland and decided nah, in general i have a lot of Ideas about Alice and this is one of them, mostly meta, ofc sort of?, some fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-25
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-19 20:36:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9459491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sergeant_angel/pseuds/sergeant_angel
Summary: There is always an Alice, true. But not all Alices are created equal, something Emma finds out when she somehow becomes friends with a man who has tried, on multiple occasions, to kill her.Look, her life is weird, she's over it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is ooc and is probably a little spotty on the sense but well.

"Hey, I just wanted to apologize for running late," Emma blurts out at the after-school arts program lady after sending Henry to find Grace. "I got caught up in paperwork."

"It's not a problem, really," the woman smiles at Emma. "Five minutes isn't even something to be worried about. This is my first time here, and if this is the worst the school can throw at me, well."

"No, really, it's not something I normally do, and I'm sorry again, Ms. Alice."

The woman frowns at her. "Excuse me?"

“Are you not—I thought you were Alice?” Emma hopes she hasn't done one of those Enchanted Forest taboo things she occasionally accidentally still does. “Henry seems to think your name is Alice.”

“Alice is—more of a title, really.”

“Wait—how is a name a title? And _where_ is a name a title?”

“Oh, come now. As if _Pan_ wasn’t a title, or Charming. Anything can be a title.”

“But Alice—“ Emma strings the word out, tasting it, drawing it out and lilting it in a way she remembers it being said to her. "Alice in Wonderland?"

"Well.."

“ _The_ Alice of Wonderland." It _finally_ clicks in her mind. "Not—Not The Alice _Lydia_?”

“Mom, come _on_ ,” Henry barges back into the room, Grace in tow. “Granny is going to be out of the cherry-appleberry gruyere surprise.”

Emma has no chance to respond to this fairly dramatic and pressing problem because Grace has barreled past both Henry (who looks a bit heartbroken) and Emma (who is mostly impressed by the upper-body strength displayed by the middle-schooler) to shriek and throw her arms around the Alice.

(Considering who Grace's father is, perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising.)

“Your Aliceness!” Grace looks up at the woman with what can modestly be called adoration and can honestly be called love.

“Grace?” The Alice, for her part, appears to have lost control of her knees and collapses to the floor, hands on the girl’s shoulders, peering at her face. “ _Grace_?”

The Alice seems caught between staring at Grace and hugging her, a problem Grace doesn’t have—she opts to keep hugging. “My very favorite Alice,” the girl whispers, hand fisted in the lime-green wool of the Alice’s sweater.  

* * *

“Wonderland,” Jefferson had once told her, “has appetites. It has rules that the inhabitants bend and twist, getting as close to breaking them as possible. A world like that isn’t stable. People fall through. Usually, Wonderland chews them up and spits them out. Sometimes, though,” he’d paused, something painful passing across his features. “Sometimes, someone falls in to Wonderland, and they have something inside of them, something bright and whimsical and Wonderland bows to them. Wonderland _loves_ them.”

“Like Alice,” Emma had said, pausing to crane for a view of Henry and Grace. They’re too old for this to technically be a playdate but there’s still some deeply entrenched parent-instinct that has her checking on their whereabouts every few minutes.

Not like they’ve survived magical lands, or being shuffled between worlds several times, or anything.

“ _The_ Alice,” Jefferson corrected her once she sat back down.

“ _The_ Alice?” she parroted, smirking at him. “Sounds like a pretty special gal, then.”

“Alice is a title. An honorific,” he’d gone on to explain. “The Alice of Wonderland brings sense to the senseless and wonder to the sensical. The Alice—"

“So were you in love with all of them, or just one?”

“The Alice can be any one, from any time. Not in order,” Jefferson ignored her. “Once had a gentleman from the ‘80s followed by an elderly woman from the 1760s.”

“Who—"

“Wonderland _hungers_ for an Alice. And,” he held up his hand, to stall her inevitable interruption. “She was the Grand Alice Lydia. Or Her Aliceness. The title is pretty transitory—"

“Lydia. Stay on topic, Jefferson.”

“Lydia Liddell. Late 1880s or 1890s, she was never sure, not sure if she was from America or England. The Alices tend to inherit traits of their predecessors—it’s _Wonderland_ , it’s not like it runs by normal rules.”

“But she wasn’t Grace’s mother?”

Jefferson had glanced over at his daughter before he shook his head. “Grace loved her, though. Lydia had this way of seeing the world, and making other people see it that way—a kaleidoscope of wonder, she used to say. She’d always bring Grace trinkets from Wonderland. Clothes, sometimes. Poems.”

“I thought you stopped going to Wonderland?”

“I did. We met when she first fell, before Grace was born. I was a bit—rash, in those days. She liked my coat, you see, and that was the only reason she let me come back.”

“Your coat? Seriously?”

“Well, it did have a lot of pockets. She was easily bribed in the early days. Just the usual. Meat pies, a few dandelions, marbles. All perfectly acceptable tokens for entry. But it was the coat, honestly.”

“You’re screwing with me. You have to be.”

“ _Wonderland_ ,” he stressed again. “Up is down. Left is right. The food is madness. Did you want to hear the story or not?”

Emma took the hint, and quieted.

“Our paths crossed in other ways—and Wonderland loved her more than any other Alice I’d ever known, and it let her leave and return more than any other Alice. Wonderland was just that for her—a land of wonder.”

“What happened to her?” Emma’s voice got low, unsure of how this story ended—happy or not?

“I don’t know,” Jefferson stared at his hands. His jaw clenched and he tugged at the scarf, high on his neck, hiding his scar. “The Queen of Hearts did not tolerate the office of Alice. It’s part of why Wonderland became a terrible place after Cora took over the suit. The Queen of Hearts always has to come to terms with the fact that she is not, in fact, the Heart of Wonderland. The Alice is, and the kind of Wonderland you have is a reflection of the Alice. Wonderland loved Lydia, though, and she loved Wonderland.  I think—“ he’d hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure he was allowed to say what he was going to, before forging on ahead. “Wonderland whispered to me while I was there, making hats, trying to get it to work. Wonderland loved her, and she loved...me. So I think Wonderland was trying to love me as best it could with—"

“With no heart?”

“With a rotten, stinking heart.” He’d gotten stormy-eyed, then. “A cruel, deceitful, pus-filled _hey_ sweetie!”

“Nice save,” Emma muttered into her coffee.

“You’re talking about hers again, aren’t you, Papa? The Alices?”

“Alices?” Henry’s ears had practically perked up. “As in Wonderland?”

Jefferson was kind enough to oblige with some less terrifying stories about Wonderland to close out the evening.

* * *

The Alice— _Lydia_ , Emma corrects herself, the poor woman has a name—accompanies them to Granny’s. Apparently the dual draw of Grace and cherry-appleberry gruyere surprise is too much for the Alice.

Emma had expected an Alice to be more—blonde, with a blue dress and white apron.

Lydia isn’t this at all. She’s bright, electric colors and bold prints; candy-apple red glasses perched precariously on her nose, an orange-sherbet colored shirt under the green sweater, leggings with a geometric pattern that upon closer inspection are birds in bold colors—Emma catches sight of a flamingo in there—tucked into electric purple suede boots.

She’s certainly got a _style_ , that’s for sure.

Lydia’s hair is a glossy ink-spill down her back, her skin the color of dusk, her eyes like chips of the moon.

She’d sort of thought Jefferson was waxing poetic when he'd said all that, but Lydia is—she _is_ beautiful, and Emma can easily see how a fickle magical land would love her.

Crap. Jefferson. Did he know she was here? Did _she_ know _he_ was here?

Well, okay, the presence of Grace probably shed light on that one, though did she know about his imprisonment in Wonderland? Maybe she thought Grace was just here on her own—maybe she’d—

“I should leave you to it,” Lydia interrupts Emma’s thoughts. Her accent lilts at odds with her appearance and Emma suddenly wonders if that’s something she inherited from her Alice predecessor. If Lydia’s still alive, does that mean she was the last Alice? _Is_ the last Alice? Does Wonderland still—

“Emma Swan?”

“Yes, Your Alicehood?”

Lydia cocked her head. “Savior.”

“I thought you were staying for pie?”

“I shouldn’t.” Lydia chews on her lower lip. “The Enchanted Forest was never—I’m from here, you know. Not Storybrooke, but _here_. They don’t—"

Whatever it was that the residents of Storybrooke weren’t is cut off by Ruby, making some sort of nearly terrifying noise and flinging her arms around Lydia, dragging her into the diner.

“How are you here? How did you get here? What took you so long _I’m so glad you’re here!_ ” Can be heard through the door.

“Not many people knew her in the Forest,” Grace tells Emma, like she’s telling a secret. “She wasn’t supposed to leave Wonderland quite so much as she did.”

“Well, if it isn’t my darling Grace and our illustrious sheriff!” Jefferson is practically hopping down the street towards them. “And how are you two lovely ladies?”

His gangly legs come to a halt before the rest of him seems to, swaying to a stop and brandishing his phone. “Grace, this does not appear to be an emergency.”

Emma sees the glint in Grace’s eye as she says, “A _Wonderlander,_ Papa. I thought you’d want to know,” just as the Wonderlander in question practically falls out of Granny’s.

(Well, Alices _fall,_ don’t they? Down rabbit holes and stuff.)

And fall into Mad Hatters.

“ _Lydia_ ,” Jefferson barely breathes her name.

“J-jeff-ferson?” _his_ name is practically scraped from Lydia, like she’s afraid to let go of it.

They stare at each other (and everyone is staring at them through the windows of Granny’s, though they don’t seem to notice.)

Jefferson looks like he’s about to take a knee, thought Emma couldn’t honestly say if it would be to swear allegiance to Lydia, or propose, or just pass out.

“My _Alice_ ,” he finally manages.

(Probably swearing allegiance, then. Or fealty?)

“My _Hatter!_ ”

Where Jefferson’s shock had muted him somewhat, Lydia got, if anything, louder and almost _brighter._ Lydia can’t seem to keep to herself then, launching at Jefferson, sending them both toppling to the pavement.

Where they just _stare_ at each other, drinking each other in.

“Ugh,” Ruby voices Emma’s thoughts. “ _Kiss_ already, jeez.”

They took the directive with gusto, and _wow_ , okay, sure it’s been almost thirty years but, “Guys. You’re in public. Don’t make me have to arrest you.”

“Any jail would be bearable with you, my love,” Jefferson sounds and looks utterly besotted.

Lydia traces her fingers along his scar. “As if a prison could _hold_ us.”

“Gross,” Ruby once again interjects.

“Don’t worry,” Grace pats Ruby’s arm. “I know how to pick locks. I can get them out.”

“Well, of course,” Jefferson nods at Grace as she kneels next to her father and the woman who has him more or less pinned to the sidewalk. “That settles that.” He somehow manages to lift both Grace _and_ Lydia to their feet while settling back on his.

Grace is a little _mastermind,_ and Emma spares a second for the thought before watching with pure delight one of her most _favorite_ things:

A happily-ever-after.


End file.
